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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2012
Slavery and freedom are intimately connected, that contrary to our atomisticprejudices it is indeed reasonable that those who most denied freedom, aswell as to those to whom it was most denied, were the very persons mostalive to it. Once we understand the essence and the dynamics of slavery, weimmediately realize that there is nothing in the least anomalous about thefact that an Aristotle or a Jefferson owned slaves. Our embarrassmentsprings from our ignorance of the true nature of slavery.
(Orlando Patterson)The analysis of divine law in the Islamic context took place primarily in theliterary genre known as furū‘ al-fiqh (branchesof jurisprudence). Works of furū‘ can beclassified in two categories, mukhtaṣars or epitomes ofthe law and mabsūṭs or expansums. When writing myPh.D. thesis on the Fatāwā‘Alamgīrī, I was directed to theMukhtaṣar of Aḥmad b. Muḥammadal-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037) as a text containing a succinctexposition of the Ḥanafī laws of marriage. I found the text to bevery concise and clear in elucidating the major issues around marriage as acontract. The style was one of offering the rules rather than discussing pointsof disagreement. Yet I did not return to the Mukhtaṣarafter the initial analysis of marriage laws. In his later work on form andcontent of furū‘ texts, my supervisor, the lateNorman Calder, describes this particular mukhtaṣar (alsocalled matn or text) as ‘the finest of theḤanafī mukhtaṣars’ which was‘for centuries a teaching tool, a point of reference and a focus ofcommentary, due to its reliability as an expression of the basic norms of theḤanafī tradition’.
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